VentureBeat

Social networking for women got a boost yesterday as media conglomerate Meredith Corp. acquired an undisclosed minority stake in Real Girls Media Network. The San Francisco-based network encompasses about 30 sites and portals for women — notably, DivineCaroline, a largely user-generated advice page.

In addition to bringing Real Girls’ 3 million unique viewers to Meredith’s properties each month (upping its total to 15 million), the deal will combine the two companies’ advertising inventories and sales forces. This should jumpstart revenue on both sides. Also, Meredith will now have access to Real Girls technology that could update the look and feel of its other sites, hopefully attracting more traffic. The large public company had an online presence before, but the partnership will automatically land it in the top five women’s networks, according to ComScore.

Even so, it’s got quite a fight ahead considering its formidable competition. The woman-targeted Glam Network alone drew 52 million unique visitors in September and continues to steam ahead (recently introducing a new advertising application service). The other heavy hitters, iVillage and AOL Living, bring in about 20 and 15 million a month respectively. But NBC-backed iVillage struck a lucrative deal with BlogHer in July, adding over 2,000 blogs to its network. It’s questionable whether there’s enough room for another major player in this space.

Meredith’s forte still lies in publishing, boasting magazine titles like Better Homes and Gardens, Parents and Family Circle. But it’s diversifying into television and the web quickly, making about $1.6 billion this year. By contrast, Real Girls is still relatively young. It raised $6 million from the 3i Group and Walden Ventures in 2006 after its inception.

Coremetrics, one of many analytics companies trying to help website owners understand and market to their visitors, has raised $60 million in a fifth round of financing.

Back in 2006, we said there was some real demand in this area, but probably not enough to support all the companies that were springing up. Coremetrics, however, seems to be getting some real traction, which chief executive Joe Davis attributes to building sophisticated marketing tools — such as search engine bid marketing, email marketing and cross sell applications — on top of the basic analytics features.

Most analytics services, such as Omniture, are really designed to aggregate data about the overall patterns of site behavior. Coremetrics, on the other hand, functions as a “data warehouse” of information about each visitor, and helps you market to those visitors, Davis says. Using Coremetrics’ default package, companies can find out everything they want to know about an individual. If companies want that kind of data from the competition they have to constantly formulate and reformulate their queries — and with Coremetrics’ competition, the data collection starts anew each time, Davis adds. There is also some data that competitors just can’t get, such as a visitor’s behavior across multiple sessions.

For example, Davis says, most analytics companies will tell you that say, 20 percent of your customers put an item in their shopping cart and then abandoned it. Coremetrics can tell you who those 20 percent of people are, by gathering that information from email addresses, for example. Companies can use that information to market similar products to those customers later.

The analytics field has been winnowed down since we last took a close look, Davis says: Omniture is doing well with its paid service, and Google Analytics is popular on the free end, but most other companies — such as Webtrends — are struggling or have disappeared. Davis says Google Analytics actually functions as marketing for Coremetrics, because Google users understand the importance of analytics, but also see its limitations and are often ready to pay for additional tools.

Coremetrics’ customer base grew by 46 percent in 2007, and the company achieved profitability at the end of the year, Davis says. The San Mateo, Calif.-based startup was gearing up for an IPO when the market (and the economy as a whole) started struggling. Now the company is focused on growth instead, and may make some acquisitions in behavioral marketing and multivariate testing to expand its offerings. With the planned expansion, Coremetrics will go back into the red and likely stay there for the rest of the year, Davis says.

The round was led by the 3i Group, a new investor, and existing investors Accel Partners, FTVentures and Highland Capital Partners.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Boston Scientific spinout TriVascular2 takes in $65M (release)
• Inhaled-drug startup Transave raises $35M (release)
• Triage Wireless gets $20M for vital-signs monitors (release)
• Tryton Medical receives $14M for “bifurcation” stents (release)
  
• Synthetic bio startup Codon Devices adds $11M (release)
• Tracon Pharma takes in $4.5M against cancer and eye disease (VentureWire)
• Antibody maker f-star swaps in equity stake by TVM (PDF release)
• Drug packager MonoSol Rx withdraws IPO (IPOhome)
• GE Healthcare acquires portable-ventilator maker VersaMed (release)

Boston Scientific spinout TriVascular2 takes in $65M – In 2005, Boston Scientific acquired a Santa Rosa, Calif., medical-device startup called TriVascular. Today, it spun it out once again.

The newly private startup raised $65 million in a “first” funding round from the likes of MPM Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Delphi Ventures and Kearny Venture Partners. Thirty million dollars of that sum went straight to Boston Scientific, which also retains the right to take a minority stake in the company.

TriVascular’s original CEO, Michael Chobotov, will resume that position at the new company, joined by two other TriVascular founders. It’s not, however, entirely clear what TriVascular will be doing. The company was originally focused on repair of abdominal aortic aneurysms, which are unusual swellings of blood vessels that can rupture unexpectedly, often fatally. Boston Scientific, however, shut down its aneurysm-repair business in 2006, so it’s not immediately obvious that the reborn TriVascular will jump right back in.

Inhaled-drug startup Transave raises $35M – Transave, a Monmouth, N.J., biotech working on inhaled drugs for lung disease, raised $35 million in a fourth funding round. Investors included Quaker BioVentures, Bessemer Venture Partners, TVM Capital, Prospect Venture Partners, Fidelity Biosciences, Forbion Capital Partners and Easton Capital.

The startup is working on inhalable drugs for cystic fibrosis — in particular, a long-lasting form of the antibiotic amikacin, which is currently in mid-stage, phase II human testing. Transave had previously raised $58 million in venture capital, including a “recently completed” $40 million round.

Triage Wireless gets $20M for vital-signs monitors – Triage Wireless, a San Diego medical-device maker, raised $20.3 million in a second funding round. Investors included Qualcomm Ventures, Sanderling Ventures, 3i Group and Intel Capital.

Triage is developing wireless vital-signs monitors for long-term or continuous use. Its first product is a blood-pressure sensor that doesn’t require the old familiar inflated cuff.

Demand Media, the 18 month old company founded by former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt, has gulped another $100 million chunk of venture funding for its domain name purchases.

The latest funding, led by Goldman Sachs, is the company’s third. The previous two, for $120 million and $100 million respectively, bring the total to a whopping $320 million.

Companies like Demand buy up lists of Web site names that users are likely to accidentally type into their browsers. People looking for the popular photo site Flickr, for example, may instead type in Flicker.com.

These faux sites are then plastered with ads and information vaguely relevant to whatever the hapless surfer might have been searching for. Once the surfer lands on a site, Demand Media serves an ad from Google or some other ad network, allowing it to collect money. That  strategy made millionaires out of domain-grab pioneers like Frank Schilling and Yun Ye.

Prices for domain names have inflated vastly over the years, which is one reason why Demand needs so much money. The name Business.com sold earlier this year for $360 million, making Demand Media’s assets look like peanuts.

Although Demand could be buying more domains in hopes of eventually selling itself for a premium or passively collecting revenue, it’s more likely the company is developing its web properties into more full-fleshed destinations. Last year, Demand acquired HillClimb Media, which produces web sites.

Competitor Marchex, which owns more than 100,000 domain names, has also revealed more of its business plans. It wants to develop each page into a local, vertical portal with real information related to the domain name, many of them involving city names (for instance, a site might feature “New York” and “plumbers”).

Besides Goldman Sachs, investors in the latest round include 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Spectrum Equity Investors. Sources that talked with PEHub, which broke the story, said that the recent funding would probably be the company’s last.

For our previous coverage on Demand fundings, look here.